THINKING YOUR EMOTIONS

Somewhere in your physical brain and somehow, your brain thinks—via neurons and synapsis, and dendrites, and bio-electric charges that jump the synapses, thoughts occur. It is all a wonderful mystery which we are a very long way from solving. Yet when thinking is activated, a psycho- somatic expression arises—a feeling which can later become an emotion. The sensation which is generated from the activation of millions and millions of neurons sends messages throughout the whole body. But the feeling, and later the emotion, are not tools of cognition, they are tools of integration.

The old proverb says, “As you think, so you feel.” What an emotion reflects is an evaluation—it reflects how you evaluate your mental map about something up against your experience in the world. What you think or consider important (your value), you register that value in your body and we call the result an emotion. The emotion only tells you that relative to your evaluation, the experience is either for you or against you, pleasurable or painful, good or bad, exciting or fearful, etc.

The feeling or emotion integrates into your body the evaluations that you have cognitively chosen, they do not determine the cognitive value. They only say in essence, ‘Your map is validated by this experience or dis-validated.’ It only says, ‘Something is right according to the criteria you have set or something is wrong.’ It cannot and does not determine the cognitive content of right or wrong. That job falls to the purview of your thinking.

Now as a somatic and physiological component of your neurology, a feeling or an emotion contains an “action tendency,” that is, an impulse to take action and change things. It is not the action and what happens behaviorally is different from the emotion, but it does contain an action tendency. What a person does with that tendency or impulse falls to their response-ability—their choices and decisions. Well, that is, if they are conscious. If they default on being conscious, then it falls to their programs—their habits or to some momentary reaction.

Love gives us the action tendency of making contact. Fear contributes to the impulse to avoid. Sadness—the tendency to register loss and to grieve. Anger—an impulse to aggress and/or fight. Excitement—to approach. Joy—to smile and celebrate, etc. Whatever the emotion is, the emotion creates internal motion, motion to move out from whatever state we’re in to another state. Hence, the word e-motion was once spelled ex-motion, motion moving out. It is this moving out motion as energy that we feel when we feel an emotion. The questions now become, “What are you going to do with this energy?” “What would be the best way to own it and express it in terms of your life, your values, your relationships, etc.?” “How can you monitor this energy and channel it for your health, well-being, and effectiveness?”

Emotions, in and of themselves, are neutral. Whether they are appropriate or inappropriate goes to the thinking that created them. Was the thinking appropriate or inappropriate? The use or expression of the emotion goes to the choices that you make about what to do with that energy. Now given that emotions are neutral, the beginning place for how to manage them effectively is first to acknowledge them and accept them, then you can monitor how you create them and what you do with them.

If you do not acknowledge them, accept them, honor them as emotions—you repress them. Yet in repressing them, you are not so much as pushing down the energy, as you are rejecting them as aspects of your thinking. In doing both of these things, pushing down the energy so you do not act on the emotion, you block the emotion and perhaps cause certain muscles to hold the tension of that emotion. The emotion goes away, but the muscular tension remains—showing up as tension in the neck, back, jaws, stomach, etc.

The other thing you do is refuse to accept the emotion. You taboo it. You reject it, you block it from entering your memory, your awareness, knowledge, etc. You condemn it, you censor it, you declare it bad, evil, unuseful, unnecessary, etc. You don’t want to know it and you especially do not want to feel it. It feels unpleasant or even painful, so you set up barriers to it. Now the thinking that generates the feeling/emotion is forbidden—this is what is repressed.

The emotion is the symptom of the thinking. “I don’t want to know that I’m responsible, that I did something stupid, that I hurt someone’s feelings, that I did something unethical.” In repression you banish your thinking and your awareness. You forbid it. Healthy thinking and emoting entails embracing emotions as emotions calmly and choosing how to respond to it. But with a frame of tabooing the emotion—you set yourself against it.

Once repressed, those thoughts and emotions are no longer available to you. Consequently they work unconsciously and usually in irrational ways. How can you know if you’ve repressed certain thoughts? You will find yourself handling incomprehensible emotions, you’ll experience a conflict between your thoughts and emotions, there may be significant self-doubt, distrust of self.

Your thoughts are “message” to your body. What messages have you been sending to your body? Nathaniel Branden has said, “That which is denied by the mind is thereby trapped within the body.”